Gelco Adds Outsourcing And Online Services

<B> Gelco Adds Outsourcing And Online Services</B>

By Lynn Woods

<I>Eden Prairie, Minn.</I> - Enhancements to its ExpenseLink product--and new receipt management, auditing and data warehousing services--soon will enable Gelco to offer its customers a complete outsourcing solution to expense management.

With the introduction of ExpenseLink 2.2 this month, Gelco automatically will download charge-card transaction data to cardholders on a daily basis. Where before travelers had to input their expenses into their expense reports manually, now the reports will be automatically prepopulated with data from the issuing banks.

This enhancement will ensure greater accuracy and accountability of expenses, said Gelco product and marketing vice president Ken Davison.

"If an expense is put on the corporate card, we know the payments will be made and reimbursed," he said.

Gelco is working with all bank issuers to ensure the daily transmission of expenses. Having Gelco arrange the downloads, and store and update the charge information, promises customers fewer hassles than dealing directly with the banks, Davison added.

Other enhancements in the new version of ExpenseLink are the ability to install the program off the company's local or wide area network, cutting down on installation time; easier and faster tutorials for new users; and the ability for managers to view expense reports in greater detail, such as viewing all charges to a given project code or all out-of-policy charges. Davison noted that since "approvers are managing exceptions, with 99+ percent of expense reports within policy bounds," Gelco's process always has involved reimbursing travelers quickly, based on the figures they submit, and only auditing after the fact. Overpayments for charges that are later disallowed are deducted from future reimbursements.

On May 1, Gelco also will begin offering customers the ability to completely outsource the auditing, management and archiving of expense reports and receipts through its new "receipt management services." Gelco will image a client's receipts, process them and send the company a CD with the imaged receipts on a monthly basis, bypassing the need for storage of cumbersome paper. "We'll take receipts from your employees and handle all the record keeping, including auditing for the IRS," said senior vice president Charles Buckner.

Davison said the service was made possible by an IRS ruling that accepts imaging of receipts in place of printed ones (<I>BTN</I>, June, 23, 1997). Gelco will store the paper receipts for 60 days.

The receipt service also will utilize the Internet to enable customers to view auditing reports. In the event Gelco discovers an audit failure, it would notify the corporation by e-mail. The travel manager or accounting person then could view the record of expenses and receipts via the Web.

While receipts can be provided to Gelco directly by the traveler, Davison said most companies prefer to have travelers send receipts to an approver, who then bundles them and sends them to Gelco.

Companies that utilize Gelco's new receipt management service also might benefit from Gelco's more systematic approach to auditing. Months of research by Gelco revealed that in many cases, "the audit function is a catch-as-catch-can process," said Davison. "We found that most companies are kind of sheepish about auditing. They gather the information, but they don't perform a thorough audit."

Gelco's research shows that "a 10 percent statistical audit is most cost-effective, augmented by auditing of certain names (people who consistently break policy) and expenses, either by amount or type," said Davison. "That's how you get the most bang for your buck."

Gelco also will customize "best practices" auditing standards for customers.

Gelco plans to introduce other innovations later in the year, including a browser version of ExpenseLink due out in the third quarter. Currently, ExpenseLink is available in either a PC-based application or through a phone link. The intranet version will probably be written in Java, but Gelco will continue to offer the other links as well in order to be able to service the widest number of corporate needs, from employees in the field to desktop customers using e-mail.

Also in the third quarter, Gelco plans to introduce a data warehouse that will enable corporate customers to integrate travel data with other types of corporate information, such as human resources or profit analysis. "We take all the T&E information and put it in a format that can be integrated with other data," said Buckner. "We'll provide the reporting tools--customers can break out costs in three or four different ways."

The company also is planning to roll out a new data service that will draw on the information it collects from its broad customer base, which includes some 1,500 corporate clients. "With that volume comes information," said Buckner. "For instance, I could drill down in a customer's database and show that their dinner costs are 10 percent more than that of our other customers.